Case Number 05294

CITY OF GOD

The Charge

"I smoke, I snort, I've killed and robbed. I'm a man."

Opening Statement

Currently ranked #23 on the Internet Movie Database's "Top 250"
list, above cinematic classics like Lawrence of Arabia and Psycho,
City of God will be one of the best films you ever have the pleasure of
seeing.

Yes, it's just that good. Period.

Facts of the Case

In the 1960s, flooding and homelessness forced the undesirables of Rio de
Janeiro onto the streets of the city, much to the chagrin of local government.
Concerned that the growing population of miscreants would disrupt the
picture-perfect postcard of Brazil's hottest tourist destination, the solution
was to construct cheap housing on the outskirts of town, round up the homeless,
and toss them into the "housing project" With no paved roads, no
electricity, no plumbing, and no transportation, conditions were less than ideal
in Cidade de Deus, AKA the City of God, and in no time at all, it became one of
the worst slums in the world.

For the young, life in the City of God could take three paths: you either
became police officers, criminals, or menial workers forced into the lowliest of
repetitive jobs. For this reason, crime became a particularly appealing and
glamorous vocation. The older boys, fancying themselves as gangsters and
hoodlums of the highest caliber, begin robbing trucks for propane and holding up
the occasional hotel in town. Rocket, the small brother of one of the more
glamorous and successful thugs, tells the tale of his brother's little gang, and
becomes our narrator. He finds he is not mean-spirited enough to be a criminal,
not tough enough to be a police officer, and too smart to subject himself to
menial work. His path, he seems to realize, is convoluted and unclear.

But the other boys his age have no problem whatsoever with a life of crime.
One of the small boys, L'il Dice, attaches onto the group and tries to prove his
manliness; he desperately wants to be the toughest gangster in town. As the boys
grow up, Rocket manages to avoid, for the most part, a life of crime, while L'il
Dice revels in it. Gradually, as a teenager, L'il Dice becomes the toughest hood
in the City of God, and by the early 1980s, takes over the drug trade with
blitzkrieg efficiency and savage ferocity. Soon, he runs the entire slums.

City of God follows Rocket through the years into adolescence, where
he flirts with the idea of becoming a gangster, but ultimately finds he cannot
muster the cruelty required. Instead, with a beaten-up, stolen camera, he
discovers photography, and it offers him an alternative to a life of thievery
and crime. He takes a job at a newspaper in order to escape the life of the
slums. Through flashback, Rocket tells the tale of the City of God through a
camera's lens, pointed by a teenager boy and the madness that surrounds him
every day. He chronicles the crime, the friendships, the lifestyles, the drugs,
the death, the police, and every other aspect of living in the City of God
through a journalist's eye, as a way of escaping the carnage, trying to
disassociate from it through cold objectivity.

Objectivity flies straight out the window, however, when a photo of L'il
Zé (the re-named L'il Dice) and his crew accidentally ends up on the front
page of his newspaper. With the most powerful gang in the City of God
brandishing their weapons flamboyantly in full view, Rocket realizes he may have
gone too far. After all, L'il Zé has killed people for simply crossing the
street in front of him...how will he react to seeing his gang on the front page
of the news? Rocket, trying to escape the violence of the City of God, realizes
with horror that he may have signed his own death warrant...

The Evidence

City of God is a staggering film in every sense of the word -- you are
overwhelmed with emotion and astonishment to the point where you cannot walk or
stand up. Brilliantly conceived, expertly directed, stunningly beautiful,
heartbreaking, and terrifying all at the same time, there exist so few film
experiences like City of God that combine the artistic impact of a
knockout performance in directing, acting, story and characters while
simultaneously having genuine emotional resonance from real-life events.
Watching City of God is like finding a diamond in a haystack; the sheer
beauty of the treasure is almost overshadowed by the sheer delight and shock of
having discovered it. When I first came out of the movie theater, catching the
film during its first limited theatrical run, I was convinced I had seen the
best movie of my life.

Okay, in retrospect, I may have been slightly dramatic making that
claim...but nevertheless, I maintain that City of God is one of the
finest films I have ever had the pleasure of seeing. This is the kind of film
that Gangs of New York so desperately wanted to be: a sweeping epic story
of a city in conflict and turmoil, about gangs and the politics and friendships
therein, a film about an environment spanning the years with devastating
emotional impact and social relevance. Many film critics have likened Fernando
Meirelles, the young director of City of God, as something of a
Brazillian Martin Scorsese and have compared this film to Goodfellas in
tone, inflection, filmmaking style, and presentation, though I find the
comparison to Gangs of New York more apt.

Oh yes...did I mention this was a great movie? Because holy crap, this is a
good movie. Just for the record.

Director Meirelles is a master of his form from the opening sequence; a
knife being sharpened ominously on a stone, edited between images of chickens
looking dazed and confused. From the first frame, the film flies out of the
gates. The editing, a quick-cut, ultra-modern fast paced style jangles the
nerves and sets a tone of feverish excitement, and the directorial style, while
not original in presentation, simply borrows heavily from others in a marvelous
hodge-podge of quick cuts, Matrix-esque spin-a-rounds, split-screen
camera shots, and other such trickery. While the style itself is heavily
derivative, the director has assembled it marvelously into a seamless, organic
presentation that feels astonishingly vibrant and original. The film itself,
told mostly in flashback, is comprised of small vignettes and sequences, each
centering on a person, a place, or an event, all narrated by Rocket. More
interestingly, certain sequences stop halfway through, are abandoned by the
narrator, and picked up later on, when the audience has been clued in on some
vital piece of information. Stories are often told again, from a different point
of view or a different character's view. The effect makes City of God
feel like a true confessional; like a story that comes pouring out, the order
doesn't always make sense, and the teller often backtracks, or clarifies, or
simply jumps ahead as they see fit. The narrator sees his world with honesty,
objectivity, and a surprising amount of humor and levity, all things
considered.

On its own, City of God is a powerhouse of a film, but even more
astonishing is the realization that this film is based on true events, on actual
people painting a realistic/autobiographical picture of life in the ghetto.
Certain scenes were reconstructed from newspaper photographs depicting real-life
carnage and slaughter in the slum, and news sequences were re-created
shot-for-shot to add authenticity. Perhaps even more amazing is that almost all
the actors in this film were complete amateurs, recruited from the actual City
of God in Rio de Janeiro. Lead actors Leandro Firmino (L'il Zé) and
Alexandre Rodrigues (Rocket) give amazing performances on their own, but knowing
that they grew up in the slums themselves only intensify the authenticity of
their characters. Simply put, the acting in this film is nothing short of
astonishing, even more so when considering the large majority of the actors are
barely teenagers. In fact, this hard-hitting authenticity so accurately depicted
the hopelessness, the squalor, and the violence of the inescapable ghetto that
it actually brought about a certain level of reform by the government. After the
film exploded on the international scene, in response to the spotlight bearing
down on their embarrassing lack of involvement, the newly elected Brazilian
majority actually instituted progressive reform to try and clean things up in
the City of God. How cool is that?

City of God, given its subject matter, is not without its
controversy, and not without a large following of detractors, cynics, and
mudslingers debunking the film for its graphic depiction of violence. Funny
thing is, the violence in City of God is far less graphic that you would
imagine it to be. In fact, very little is shown on-screen. Rather, the violence
is in the subtle undertone of every action, in every reaction that the
characters make. The nostalgic troublemaking and glamorous thievery that Rocket
half-idolizes growing up in the 1960s soon degrades into the cold, cruel, and
brutal drug wars of the 1980s, and we watch, powerless, as the film rapidly
descends into madness, violence, and the brutality of an all-out gang war waged
by children. This last element, the violence depicting children, is especially
uncomfortable for many. No doubt about it, the kids in this movie are
frightening -- like Children Of The Corn creepy -- and they drink, swear,
curse, and shoot people with guns with a primal savagery that makes your guts go
twisty. True, the film's unapologetic frankness can easily be mistaken for
callous cruelty, but to dismiss City of God this way sells the film
short. The children exhibit savagery that is born from life on the streets,
where most of their friends will never live to the age of twenty. Put frankly,
the things that you bring away from City of God are not easy to digest,
but the film balances gracefully on the knife-edge of sensationalism and
exploitation, never dipping to either side. The morals of the film are complex,
and drawing a line between right and wrong, between good and bad is a difficult
task. The film stays real, honest, brutal, and moving, never using violence to
cheapen the experience.

There is no proper way to articulate the gut-wrenching feeling of watching a
movie in a comfortable living room, knowing that in other parts of the world,
childhood debates are settled with guns, and eight-year-old kids sell crack on
the street. To put it simply: that just ain't right. Even the worst
neighborhoods of North America represent a higher standard of living, potential,
and freedom than the oppressive poverty of other countries. This is not an easy
thing to come face-to-face with fictionally in a film, let alone when the events
are based on reality. Watching children gun each other down over gang territory,
drugs, and out of sheer boredom is frightening and disturbing to anyone who has
a central nervous system. The real City of God is a frighteningly despondent
place, a soul-crushing, body-rending machine that destroys everything in its
path. Escaping the city is as hard as surviving a day in its winding, filthy
streets. And now we come to the heart of the film. Not merely about the crime,
the violence, the brutality, or even the city itself, in a deeper sense, City
of God is a film about rejecting destiny, about finding a new path. From the
beginning, we meet a narrator who is fated to become a gangster, having been
born into a desperate and violent environment from which there is no escape of
any kind. His destiny is sealed...and yet, inconceivably, he struggles against
massive social, political, economic, and cultural pressures that force him to
stay subservient to his own dreams and desires. This is an incalculably
difficult task; after all, if a ghetto were easily escapable, who would choose
to live there?

From a technical standpoint, Miramax has treated City of God with the
respect it deserves, almost. The transfer is sharp and conservative; blacks are
dark, but could easily be darker, while the sharpness of the image is undercut
slightly by the general, documentary-style graininess of the picture itself.
Colors filter between the icy blues and grays of nighttime sequences to the
blistering oranges and greens of daylight shots, and look fantastic. A tiny
suggestion of jagged edges crop up now and again, along with some small amounts
of shimmering edges, but overall, Miramax has done a bang-up job on this
transfer, which is crystal-clear save for the occasional white spot of dust now
and again. In terms of audio, this movie definitely excels. A Dolby 5.1 track
(in original Brazilian Portuguese) is included, and like the video transfer, is
also mixed rather conservatively. Bass response is excellent yet reserved, and
the track makes great use of its dynamic space, placing environmental noises,
sound effects, and music into the rear channels, constantly shifting and moving.
It creates a fantastic feeling of being surrounded by all angles by the city.
Almost all dialogue comes through the center channels, and words always come
through cleanly and crisply. The subtitles are free from major defects or
grammatical incongruities, which is always nice. The soundtrack, a funky mix of
samba, jazz, funk, and Brazilian tunes makes up for its randomness with its
sheer level of energy and intensity. All in all, this is a great audio
presentation.

Only a single supplementary feature is included on this DVD, but it's a
goodie. The hour-long feature "News From A Personal War" takes an
in-depth and intimate look into the real City of God and meets the people that
inhabit the desolate slums...the policeman who invade it, the criminals that
control it, and the people who inhabit it, living in fear of both sides. A
fantastically compelling documentary on its own, it has the added emotional
impact of confirming that yes, in fact, these events did happen, and that there
really is a City of God. The revelation is a disturbing one in its own right.
Though a single extra feature is a bit on the light side, the
dropkick-to-your-head intensity and overall quality of the featurette more than
makes up for it.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Methinks Miramax could have done more with this DVD. The presentation simply
does not do the film justice...not by any fault of the presentation itself, but
rather, because the film simply deserves more. The transfer, while excellent, is
not as bodacious as it could have been, and a film like this screams for a
director's commentary track and more extra content. This is the kind of movie
with enough clout to warrant a two-disc edition; especially considering Miramax
held back on releasing the DVD for months after the film garnished four Oscar
nominations. Though there is nothing really wrong with this DVD, in my eyes,
there was no reason not to overload this feature and push it as one of the best
films of the year, and for Miramax to give it the stellar presentation it truly
deserved.

Closing Statement

Forget renting...City of God will be one of the best blind buys you
ever make. The film is funny, moving, epic in its grandeur and sincerity,
depressing, frightening...in fact, just about every human emotion that can be
experienced shows up at least once in this film. I really cannot recommend this
film strongly enough, and I have yet to meet anyone who has not been blown away
by this film.

In summation: buy it buy it buy it buy it buy it buy it buy it. Buy it!

The Verdict

If this court had the authority to order every man, woman and ch -- well, not
children, but if we could make everyone watch City of God, I would hereby
order it immediately.